“It’s clear that there’s a highly vocal and highly technical group of people who love all of the technical things you can do with Android phones that you can’t do on iOS, consciously reject the iPhone and care deeply about ‘openness’ and all the things that go with it,” Benedict Evans blogs. “However, it’s also clear that these people are a minority of actual Android users, given that the typical use levels seen from Android in totality are lower than those from the iPhone (often much lower).”
“What hasn’t been clear, though, is quite how small that community is,” Evans writes. “Less than a tenth of Android users care that it’s open. The number of people who care that Android is open is about the same as the number of people who run Linux.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Don’t forget to count all of the knot-heads inside Google who can’t see the forest for the trees. That’s another whole 50,000 right there. 😉
Google loves to characterize Android as ‘open’ and iOS and iPhone as ‘closed.’ We find this a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches… Compare this with iPhone, where every handset works the same. Twitter client, TwitterDeck, recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations presents developers with a daunting challenge. Many Android apps work only on selected Android handsets running selected Android versions. And this is for handsets that have been shipped less than 12 months ago. Compare this with iPhone…
…There will be at least four app stores on Android, which customers must search among to find the app they want and developers will need to work with to distribute their apps and get paid. This is going to be a mess for both users and developers. Contrast this with Apple’s integrated App Store which offers users the easiest to use, largest App Store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.
“In reality, we think the ‘open’ vs. ‘closed’ argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue which is: What’s best for the customer? Fragmented versus integrated. We think Android is very, very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day. And, as you know, Apple strives for the integrated model so the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator. We see tremendous value in having Apple, rather than our users, be the systems integrator.”
“We think this is a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s. When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time. And we also think our developers can be more innovative if they can target a singular platform, rather than a hundred variants. They can put their time into innovative new features, rather than testing on hundreds of different handsets. So we are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as “closed,” and we are confident that it’ll triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as “open.” – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, October 18, 2010